Conservative Amazons

Gas prices are rising. What happens when gas prices rise? Everyone starts looking to Washington to find a way to lower gas prices so that we can keep burning fossil fuels willy-nilly:

Soaring gasoline prices spilled over into Washington and the presidential race yesterday, as Congress moved toward a showdown with President Bush over legislation aimed at forcing oil companies to help ease the burden on consumers.

First, can anyone tell me where the Constitution guarantees the right to inexpensive gasoline? Second, the people who want to pander to voters by trying to lower gas prices tend to be the same ones who want more environmental regulation to prevent the advancement of global warming. Putting aside completely the merits of any given regulation, isn’t an increase in gasoline prices exactly what we should be hoping for?

When oil is cheap, there is no economic incentive to either conserve it or find alternative energy sources. When the price starts soaring, we have the good people of GM cutting production of their giant trucks and SUVs in favor of smaller vehicles, and presumably people will find other ways to use less gas: carpooling, public transportation, walking or biking when possible. High gas prices are not an environmental panacea, but they can only really help the push for innovation and conservation.

Also, when you have the government jumping in the make things better, you tend to get situations like this:

[ethanol] has linked food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records, pulling up the price of anything that can be poured into a gasoline tank. “The price of grain is now directly tied to the price of oil,” says Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they’re beginning to fuse.”

Thanks, guys, I know I really appreciate paying more for my groceries because someone had the boneheaded idea that ethanol would cure our gasoline-price ills.  To say nothing of the poor in third-world nations who are getting pushed past malnutrition and into actual starvation by rising food prices.

First we have Maureen Dowd’s indecision over whether it’s permissible to revert to gender stereotypes (yes when you’re talking about Clinton, no when you’re talking about Dowd).  Now we have Michael Gerson making an otherwise excellent point:

On the evidence of the Virginia speech, McCain’s worst temptation is not anger but moral arrogance. Opponents are not merely wrong; they are venal, self-interested and corrupt. In a righteous cause, McCain can be self-righteous.

Which is unfortunately made less insightful by the fact that Gerson is afflicted with the same flaw: anyone who disagrees with his pet projects must be a “shriveled soul” and an “anti-government extremist.”

So the real question is, if we put McCain and Gerson in a moral arrogance cage match, who would emerge the victor?  It’s a real toss-up.

Hey girl, I was reading your column today (I blame my masochistic tendencies), and one phrase in particular stuck out at me:

[Hillary Clinton'] message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

Now, I’m know fan of Clinton either (The Mr. or the Mrs.), but I couldn’t help but recall that you once wrote a column decrying the gender stereotypes that keep women from writing opinion columns, and complaining about how men perceived you:

While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it’s seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I’m often asked how I can be so “mean” - a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn’t get.

So let me get this straight: gender stereotypes about who is supposed to be the aggressor are  bad when they are applied to you, and it isn’t fair that women who write tough columns should be called “emasculating.”  But when Hillary Clinton campaigns exactly the same way that hundreds of male politicians across the ages have before her, you get to call her message “emasculating,” thereby contributing to the gender stereotypes that hurt tough women.   Which basically means that you are above the standards you would apply to everyone else.

Ok, got it.

-Marianne

You know you want to send all of your environmentally-conscious friends hilarious Earth Day cards.  And by doing it online instead of with real paper, you can give yourself a pat on the back for your earth-friendly actions.

I’m a little late on this, but I had to share this doozy from the NY Times.  In honor of tax day, Richard Conniff argues that we should start calling taxes “dues” because the word brings to mind social obligation rather than force and punishment.

The whole thing is kind of annoying, but the worst was the last paragraph:

So this will be an uphill struggle. But we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together. Instead of denouncing taxes, politicians would do better to appeal to the patriotic corners of our hearts that warm to phrases like “we the people.” “Taxation” is a throwback to the time when kings picked our pockets. “Paying my dues,” a phrase popularized in the jazz music world, is language by which we can stand together as Americans.

First, we don’t thrive in this nation because of government - we thrive because of entrepreneurial spirit, good ideas, liberty, moral values, etc.  This things are sometimes aided by taxes and government spending, and sometimes harmed.

Second, by singling out schools and transit systems, he ignores the main reason conservatives fight for lower government, missing the point of our outrage altogether.  I don’t object to the use of tax money to pay for public goods like roads and national defense, which meet the twin criteria of non-excludability and non-rivalry in consumption - things that are generally considered market failures.  I do object, most heartily, to the use of my tax money for those “10,000 other services,” which include transfer payments like welfare, earmarks, subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare, and programs aimed at social engineering.

Conservatives and libertarians also often object to the form that taxation takes, such as the unconstitutionality of an income tax, the progressive tax code that punishes success at the margins and the unnecessary complications that force Americans to waste time and money just trying to avoid breaking the law.

“Taxation” may be a throwback to an earlier time, but it conveys what “dues” cannot: the underlying threat of force behind taxes.  If you don’t pay your dues, you don’t get to stay in the club.  If you don’t pay your taxes, the government can throw you in jail.  That’s a distinction that goes far beyond semantics.

No thinking conservative sits around saying “there shouldn’t be any taxes on anything!”  But there is plenty of room for objections that go far beyond the feel-good rhetoric of doing your part and fulfilling your social obligations.

From a NY Times article on young Obama supporters:

“I’m glad they’re interested in something other than their own self-interest and partying,” Mrs. Wall [mother of an Obama supporter] said.

I think I’d prefer it if everyone supporting Obama were too busy partying to vote.  Then they’d only be hurting themselves.  But if they actually get him elected, they inflict their idiocy on me.

I just don’t buy that idealism is worth a great deal - especially when that idealism translates into “other people should pay for things that I want.”

Can you tell I have my grumpy grandpa cardigan on today?

We’ve already seen the grievance-mongering, hysteria-driven case against Hillary Clinton dropping out of the race.  Now we have a more reasonable, well-researched one. Sean Wilentz at Salon looked into the Democratic primary system and concluded that Clinton would be the sure winner if the primaries worked like the general election did, with a winner-take-all system.

You should read the whole article, because it documents some of the electoral machinations of the Obama team - which are not exactly of the post-partisan standard we have been led to expect:

In Michigan, Obama’s supporters thwarted efforts to pass the legislation necessary to conduct a new primary. In Florida, campaign lawyers threw monkey wrenches to stop the process cold, claiming that a revote would somehow violate the Voting Rights Act, and charging that a proposed mail-in revote would not be “fraud proof.” (Obama himself, it’s important to note, proposed a bill in 2007 to allow for mail-in voting in federal elections.)

Instead, Obama’s campaign has tendered the startling proposal that he arbitrarily be allotted half of the votes already cast in Michigan and Florida. Of course, a large number of these votes — more than a quarter of a million in Florida alone — were not cast for Obama. He simply proposes that the party add these votes to his total, as though they were rightfully his. Saying that votes already cast for other candidates should go to him is a bold power grab, worthy of the Chicago machine organizations that claimed the votes of the recently deceased, their names gleaned from the voting rolls. By any definition of democracy, those votes do not belong to Obama; nor do they belong to Hillary Clinton, nor to Howard Dean. They belong to the voters. Obama can no more lay claim to them legitimately than his supporters can declare he has won the nomination before the remaining primaries take place.

So let me get this straight - Obama is willing to count Florida and Michigan as long as he gets half the votes?  Huh?  The article also notes that Obama has dominated the caucuses, which are dominated by those who can afford to go to the appointed location at the appointed time - leaving people like hourly wage earners without a fair chance at having their vote counted.

Whether you like Obama or Clinton, or wish the two of them would just go away, this is a good reminder that politics is politics - even the idealist candidate is going to play the game.

A: When she’s also a conservative.

We’ve already seen one local magazine equate conservatism with misogyny. And we’ve seen a video created by that same magazine which points out that feminists don’t hate men - they just hate conservatives, male and female alike.

While I was doing research on women in the media (specifically, diversity on op-ed pages), I came across a couple of real gems in The Women’s Review of Books. From my paper (emphasis mine):

Even those who advocate equal space in op-ed pages for women may have stringent requirements for those they consider deserving of the space. Writing in The Women’s Review of Books, Zimmerman bemoans the fact that “what you can find, of course, are right-wing commentators like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter filling women’s allotted air time and print space” (2003, p. 6). Pozner made a similar point when writing about women’s exclusion from media, noting that “right-wing women like Ann Coulter, Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, Mona Charen, Amy Holmes, Laura Ingraham maintain a high profile in the mainstream media, while progressive feminist writers like media critic Laura Flanders or journalist Barbara Ehrenreich are most often heard in the Left press” (2002, p. 20).

Implicit in the first quote is that conservative women are not really representative of womanhood, and therefore ought not to be given any of women’s alloted spaces. Explicit in the second quote is that feminists aren’t so much concerned with making sure that women and men are given equal time and space - they’re concerned with whether liberal, feminist women are getting time and space. Conservative women’s voices don’t really count as women’s voices, because they are mere tools of the patriarchy/Corporate America/President Bush/insert-liberal-bogeyman-here.

The suggestion that Madame Clinton leave the race rather than dropping not-so-subtle hints about the power of super-delegates to do what they please has some quarters in full hell-hath-no-fury mode.  I am, of course, talking about Clinton’s Bitter Women Brigade.  The message now?

Those asshole men are trying to get Clinton to leave the race because she doesn’t have a penis and they do.

 Have you noticed something similar about those Barack Obama campaign surrogates and the media soothsayers who have started a drum-beat to force Hillary Clinton out of the Democratic presidential contest? Hint: They tend to share a certain anatomical attribute.

And if you think I’m kidding, try reading the whole article.

That’s right, folks.  They aren’t urging her to leave because they want to start running against John McCain.  Nor because they don’t want the bitter hack-and-slash of the campaign to keep giving us conservatives fresh, new material.  Nor because she can’t conceivably win without the super-delegates trumping the will of the voters.  Nope, they want her out because they just can’t take women trying to smash through the glass ceiling:

Now Clinton’s methodical, dogged history of work for the Democratic Party is treated just like the methodical, dogged histories of so many women in the workplace: Having come this far she must not go too far. She must step aside to take the smaller office, with the lesser title and the lower pay to make room for the younger guy with the thinner resume. And please, would she just go quietly like a good girl?

Doesn’t it water down accusations of gender discrimination when you use it as the explanation for everything?  Back when she was winning, none of these men were tearing her down for being a woman, or trying to hold her back.  It’s only now that she poses a risk to the Democratic win in November that they’re urging her to step aside.  And don’t even get me started on the “methodical, dogged history of work” part.

The author makes two mistakes here.  She’s trying very hard to make the personal political, by appealing to women’s sense of being wronged in the workplace.  And she’s trying to make the political personal, by explaining Clinton’s opponent’s reactions in terms of sexism rather than pure political machination.  Surely the Clintons have been in the game long enough to know that this is how it’s played.

Speaking of political machinations, I’m totally rooting for you, Hil.  I hope you convince every single one of those super-delegates to support you instead of Obama.